On All Frontiers: Four Centuries of Canadian Nursing (review)

On All Frontiers: Four Centuries of Canadian Nursing is a handsome and oversized paperback, which is also available in a French edition as Sans frontières: quatre siècles de soins infirmiers canadiens. Organized both chronologically and thematically, this collection of essays provides a broad survey of nursing practices, not merely temporally through four centuries, but within diverse cultural, social, medical, and geographical contexts. In it, seventeen researchers (holding among them a staggering collection of over forty-five nursing and history degrees) present well-written chapters on the history of lay nursing beginning in the seventeenth century, midwifery in Canada, private duty nursing, religious nursing orders and the Victorian Order of Nursing, public health and hospital nursing, military service, outpost nursing, nursing education, and the labour history of the profession. (Regrettably, there is no chapter on the history of psychiatric nursing.)

This book is one component of a cohesive project to increase public and scholarly accessibility to the newly created Canadian Nursing History Collection, a massive archival legacy of texts, photographs, and audiovisual material now under the stewardship of several different national institutions. In combination with an on-line catalogue of the collection and a major exhibition at the Canadian Museum of Civilization, On All Frontiers is meant to illuminate 'the practice of nursing, not only in the hospital, but on many frontiers: in the home, in the community, in remote outposts, on the battlefield, and in the innovation of health care practices.' This it certainly does.

Overall a well-researched and useful volume that succeeds in adding texture to traditional linear narratives in the history of nursing, this book does two things exceedingly well. First, each chapter manages to blend both the macro- and micro-history of its particular subject by combining an analysis of broad changes over time, thorough research and discussions of existing scholarship with a detailed examination of a particular person, artifact, or site of practice. Second, On All Frontiers is a helpful teaching tool and resource for other researchers. Each chapter moves between archival evidence and historian's narrative, revealing the work and practices of both nurses and historians. Details of uniforms, medical instruments, and photographs can be analysed and compared, and diary pages, medical logs, lecture notes, and certificates are reproduced so that each document can be read, often in its entirety. Thus the reader can contemplate the process of archival research and the relationship between primary and secondary texts.

It is precisely because On All Frontiers does such a marvellous job of encouraging and facilitating a closer reading of the history of nursing that those questions it leaves unexplored become apparent. The numerous and varied contexts in which nurses made undeniable contributions to community health and biomedicine are skilfully illuminated and analysed, but many of the authors seem reluctant to explore fully the conflicts (social, religious, ideological, professional, medical) that must exist in such a long history of diverse practices and complex interactions with clients, employers, patients, colleagues, superiors, communities, and, of course, other nurses. For example, in the chapter on the significance of the vast missionary network of the Grey Nuns in central, western, and northern Canada, the author stresses the benefits derived from the establishment of missions – the provision of health care to isolated communities and the transmission of medical knowledge cross-country – but leaves unexplored the relationship between mission nursing practices and issues of authority and abuse, and the mission as a site of the clash or exchange of Aboriginal and European healing practices.

As the editors themselves state, this book is a 'broad, rather than deep, treatment' of Canadian nursing history, but their promise of resources for further study is wholly fulfilled by historiographical references in the text, detailed discussions in the notes, and a comprehensive bibliography. Researchers with more specific, complex, or theoretical questions about the history of nursing will find this book an excellent overview and an invaluable resource for formulating and situating new...